the inuktitut alphabet

reprinted from omniglot.com, one of my favorite sites

Origin
The Inuktitut syllabary was adapted from the Cree syllabary in the late 19th century by John Horden and E. A. Watkins, missionaries from England. Edmund Peck promoted the use of the syllabary across the Canadian Arctic, and also translated the bible into Inuktitut, and wrote an Eskimo Grammar and an Eskimo-English Dictionary.

In 1976 the Language Commission of the Inuit Cultural Institute approved approved two standardized writing systems for Inuktitut in Canada: one using the syllabary and the other using the Latin alphabet.

Today the Inuktitut syllabary, which is known as titirausiq nutaaq (ᑎᑎᕋᐅᓯᖅ ᓄᑕᐊᖅ) or qaniujaaqpait (ᖃᓂᐅᔮᖅᐸᐃᑦ), is used mainly in Canada, especially in the territory of Nunavut (ᓄᓇᕗᑦ), the population of which is 85% Inuit, and in Nunavik (ᓄᓇᕕᒃ), Quebec. The Latin alphabet, known as qaliujaaqpait is used in other parts of Canada, Alaska and Greenland, while in Siberia the Cyrillic alphabet is used.

Notable features
Type of writing system: syllabary.
Writing direction: left to right in horizontal lines.
The Inuktitut syllabary consists of a small number of basis signs, the vowel sound attached to each one depends on their orientation.
Used to write
Inuktitut, an Eskimo-Aleut language spoken in Greenland, Canada, Alaska and Siberia by about 65,000 people. There is in fact a dialect continumum of Inuktitut dialects across the Arctic with varying degress of mutually intelligibility between them.

The language is used in schools and local government to some extent. It is also used on the radio and TV. In 2007 a new policy was introduced that will require senior government officials to speak Inuktitut by 2008. This requirement will eventually be extended of other officials.

today's toynbee tidbit

"The spirit of nationality is a sour ferment of the new wine of Democracy in the old bottles of tribalism."

holidays in the hermit kingdom

I have known people who have traveled to North Korea (no Americans of course) and for a while I had entertained this tiny country as a fantasy travel destination, it arguably being the most isolated chunk of geography on the Earth. A place where history had not ground to a halt, but where the common narrative thread simply broke off from the rest of the world half a century ago. South Korea was a western style democracy with all the trappings of a manic capitalist nation, good and bad. North Korea was a "hermit kingdom" sealed, militarized, and combining a messiah like worship of the "dear leader" Kim Ill Sung with a Marxist worker state ethic into one of the more peculiar cosmologies in history. Even now little is know about the land above the 49th parallel, although horrific reports of mass starvation and political prisons emerge from time to time, sometimes from the handful of courageous defectors who manage to escape south. Still, in a country with no advertising, no internet access, no cell phones, no media outlets save for the government controlled radio and television, generations of North Koreans are being born with literally no idea of what the outside world is like. It's a terrifying example of just how efficient an authoritarian regime can be when it sets about to completely dominate its populace, psychologically and economically. Hannah Arendt defined the difference between autocracy and totalitarianism as the need for a totalitarian state to control every aspect of its people's lives, culturally and spiritually, while in an autocracy the only divisions that ultimately mattered were class structures. North Korea to me exemplifies this as much as any nation in history alongside Khmer Rouge era Cambodia and Nazi Germany.
The so called "Korean Friendship Association" is a peculiar outfit run by amateur bedroom Stalinist Alejandro Cao de Benos de Les y Perez. Cao de Benos is a Vonnegut worthy character: he is a portly twenty-something IT consultant from Spain who has reinvented himself as a person of importance by serving as North Korea's de facto web master. Not only does he operate the country's "official" web page, he sponsors Pyongyang sanctioned group trips to North Korea through the Friendship Association. (Americans are not allowed of course, with North Korea being perhpas the only nation on Earth where simply holding an American passport is enough to prevent your admission.) Of course, Cao de Benos has been feted by Kim Jong's regime as a valuable asset, and he takes it quite seriously, squeezing into a military outfit, acting the role of celebrity, and frequently being given to histrionics on his message board. One quite amusing thread I stumbled upon a couple of years ago found various newsgroup members debating whether or not the movie "Team America" was blasphemous to the Dear Leader and should be boycotted. One savvy blogger claimed that in fact the movie was much more a satire on "America's imperialist and capitalist ambitions" and therefore kosher viewing.
It would all be quite hilarious were it not for the fact that Kim Jong Il is a psychotic dictator who avidly watches American television shows and imports champagne and thousands of dvds to his palace, while most of his people outside of the capital city starve to death, and where even an off hand joke about his personage or a doubt of his divine appointment as God on Earth is enough to get you carted away to a modern day gulag. Still, if my conscience and wallet could cope, I would be fascinated by a trip to the most remote corner of Earth.

whoops apocalypse

"Protect and Survive" was a series of public service films produced in the 1960s by the British government. The "duck and cover" mentality of the time was that a nuclear war could be won in some context, and thus governments around the world attempted to inform their populations as to methods of surviving such an attack and its aftermath. I'm fascinated by these kinds of instructional propaganda films, and some of the best were edited into the framework of the chilling documentary "Atomic Cafe". There is a Strangelove tone to this rhetoric, the chilling pragmatism of men like Herman Kahn who wrote about a "winnable" nuclear exchange, and this kind of propaganda which tried to prepare people for the unthinkable. It's a long way from Peter Watkin's "War Game" which was banned immediately by the BBC and which attempted to show in a mock documentary style just how grim the aftermath of a nuclear attack on a British town would be.

secret museum of mankind

A classic tome of ethnography, The Secret Museum of Mankind collects hundreds of early twentieth century portraits from all around the world. Head hunters, shepherds, shamans, priests, farmers, bullfighters. From saharan Africa to Basque Spain, it's a mystifying portal into a submerged past. The edition I posses has no copyright information nor does it credit an author. Who were the photographers/writers behind this? Some of you may have heard the magnificent cd series Yazoo put out under this moniker; it's named in honor of the book but it's a fitting audio companion, scratchy seventy eight recordings from the 1920s. If you see a copy of this book, buy it with haste. I know it's been reissued but don't have any information on it.

barbara plays the steel

When I was a kid growing up in Nashville, Barbara Mandrell had a side line business involving a chain of one hour photo development shops. This was before such a concept, the one hour photo, had established itself in the american conscience as a necessary convenience rather than exotic new luxury. But the lady had it all, not just business acumen. She was a country star and had a singing group with her sisters. Never realized just how hot of a steel player she was. Sneaky Pete and Lloyd Green never had the movie star looks anyway. Now I will have to go trawling for footage of Karen Carpenter drum solos (she did edge out Bonham in a "best rock drummer" poll sometime in the mid seventies but it may have been Tiger Beat. Still.....) I miss the Christmas lights at Twitty City, but this is the kind of thing that can make anyone miss what Nashville used to be.

For which we are grateful

richmond virginia 1865

know your enemy

Firstly, take the time to read this brilliant essay by Kevin Barrett.

http://www.truthnews.us/?p=1530


I don't agree with all of Barrett's views in regards to the "war on terror" and 9/11, but I think he nails this. I believe, and always have, that humans are essentially noble, that they have to be coerced into killing. I know that we have savage animal traits lingering below the surface but I also think that our common humanity is something that is discounted much of the time, especially by our politicians. The only way governments keep us in line anymore is out of fear, and it's the same fear touted by Bush and Ahmadinejad. I'm not sure about Barack Obama's chances of winning, either in the primaries or in a greater national election, but he is the first viable presidential candidate in quite some time who talks about hope, not fear. Maybe they'll nab him like Robert Kennedy for daring to force people to think beyond fear, but I guess that's rather cynical of me.
Regardless, I've been reading a very troubling, very noble volume of forgotten history called "War Without Mercy". It's by a man named John Dower, and he chooses to examine World War 2 in the Pacific theater as a race war, on both sides. Dower argues that not only were the policies of Imperial Japan genocidal (something that has been argued for years) against supposed "lesser" groups of Asians such as Chinese, Filipinos, and Koreans, but the rhetoric on both the American and Japanese sides ensured a kind of war of annihilation that did not occur between the Germans and the western Allies (as opposed to the Germans and the Russians or Slavs). In other words, did we have to drop the bomb, and if so, would we have dropped it on Germany instead of Japan? Of course not. In American propaganda of the time, the Japanese are depicted as less than human, ripe for wholesale slaughter, and I think (as does Dower) that this had a profound effect on the American conscience, coming as it did after the crippling shock of Pearl Harbor and a rapid succession of military defeats. Perhaps the reason this troubles me so much is that the rhetoric really hasn't changed that much, just the target of our hate. We have always been in fear of the "other", and Dower argues that the object of our fear simply changed from the the Japanese to the Russians to the Chinese to the Vietnamese and so on. He could have now added Arabs/Muslims.
Dower begins his book with an examination of Frank Capra's series of propaganda films he directed for the War Department, the legendary "Why We FIght" series. The last installment, "Know Your Enemy-Japan" is perhaps the most notorious, released a short time before the bombing of Hiroshima and when a land invasion of Japan was still being reckoned with. It's very troubling, very effective propaganda, because it mixes truths (the various war crimes and atrocities of Japan) with gross misrepresentations of Japanese culture (misreading Shintoism, so on), all in an effort to demonize and dehumanize the average Japanese, so as to make them easier to kill.
I'm putting up a couple of excerpts here. The film is posted in entirety on Youtube, but I wanted to give a flavor of it. To Americans of our generation, who know Japan only as an ally, culturally, politically, and economically, this will seem at turns very disturbing and puzzling.

The writ of Khan

And for today's obscure alphabet: the ancient Mongolian script, which has changed little for centuries, but is now currently only used in the autonomous Chinese province of Inner Mongolia.

A tribute to our namesake

Ohaspe

I'm fascinated by "channeled" works of art, that which connects Milton to Howard Finster's spirit paintings. One of the earliest published literary works of this sort was titled "Ohaspe:A New Bible" and it was produced via automatic writing by one John Newbrough in 1882. Newbrough was a New York dentist fascinated with spiritualism and claimed that angels guided his hands as he wrote the book. The volume mixes imaginative cosmology, science fiction worthy beings, and an alternate history of both heaven and earth, all in a florid mock-Elizabethan style of English. Perhaps most notably, Newbrough may have been the first writer to coin the word "star ship", decades before such a term was commonplace in speculative fiction. Added to that are the striking illustrations, a few of which I have placed here. If you can find an old edition of this volume at an antiquarian bookstore I would recommend it. I first became aware of it while reading the Urantia Book and doing research on other works supposedly authored by celestial beings.

bad bob

Some years ago I began collecting bizarre pocket style Christian comics found in truck stops throughout the Southeast and noticed they all bore the mysterious stamp of "Chick Publications". These comics were all more of the pedantic scare-ya home made Christian propaganda that you see everywhere, "Get right with the Boss or burn for eternity" stuff, but with a spin. Something about the Sunday paper style comics feel of them added an unsettling and yet highly amusing tone. Well Chick Publications has a slew of these, and they are all up on their web site (www.chick.com; i know, how did they finagle that little corner of cyber-state?) and I decided to post one in its entirety. It's stupefying and I urge everyone to look out for these next time you take a fueling stop along the Bible Belt.

can mitt romney read this??

One of my peculiar interests is lost or obscure alphabets. As if the Mormons couldn't get more kooky, few are aware that in the mid 1800's a unique writing system was introduced into Brigham Young's nascent colony of Utah. Known as the "Deseret" alphabet, it consisted of 38 characters, and was the creation of one George Watt, the first British convert to Mormonism and an early settler. Watt believed his alphabet was a more pragmatic, non phonetic way of writing the English language, and it had the added benefit of being a secret code completely inexplicable to the outside uninitiated. Works were published in the new script but despite heavy lobbying from Young it never took flight.

bela lam

This is spellbinding, and it can be found on the amazing dvd Yazoo put out a few years ago, "Times Ain't What They Used to Be".

wolverines

I've been watching a lot of the first season of Saturday Night Live, having recently read a biography of Michael O'Donoghue. It's bizarre to delve back into the genesis of something so culturally seminal and radical for its time; most of my life SNL has been sub-par to say the least, and it's easy to forget just how extraordinarily it stood out in the mid seventies.
I think it was the right time for a show like SNL, with dark humor, surreal interludes, and a glorious skewering of all things held sacred by decent Americans. It's a trite comparison perhaps to draw between Beatlesmania somehow emerging from the shock of the Kennedy Assassination, but I think it's no coincidence that SNL found such a willing audience in a much more cynical American public still in an addled post-Watergate fog. And rather than being funnier per se than the SNL in later years, the original season is so much more, well dangerous.
First off it was more of an old fashioned variety show than most people remember. The Muppets were an original fixture, Andy Kauffman did his routines on most of the early episodes, as well as Albert Brooks' short, ultra-surreal featurettes that I remember loving so much when I saw these shows on reruns as a kid.
It's not until the middle of the first season that the show really hit a confident stride, and I think it really comes together on the first Buck Henry episode. Chevy Chase does one of his remarkable Gerald Ford bits with vaudeville slapstick worthy of Buster Keaton, there's the great "Samurai Delicatessen" but with Belushi and Buck Henry, and one the most brilliant Michael O'Donoghue penned skits, "Citizen Kane 2". Oh, and Bill Withers is the musical guest.
Every generation continually misled and deceived by its elected powers finds its collective therapy in comedy. The Depression had Chaplin, we have the "Daily Show". It's easy to see how the original Saturday Night Live must have brought people together in living rooms the same way Roosevelt's fireside chats did, albeit with a different kind of hope offered over the airwaves.
Here's the first skit ever aired on SNL, featuring Belushi and O'Donoghue.

khadija qalanjo

Somali pop from before the fall....I would love more information on her.